Main menu

Deeplinks

Patenting podcasting? You've got to be kidding. Yet a company called Volomedia just got the Patent Office to grant them such exclusive rights.

EFF and the law firm of Howrey, LLP aren’t willing to just sit by and watch. This patent could threaten the vibrant community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. We want to put a stop to it, but we need your help.

The ACTA juggernaut continues to roll ahead, despite public indignation about an agreement supposedly about counterfeiting that has turned into a regime for global Internet regulation. The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has already announced that the next round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations will take place in January — with the aim of concluding the deal "as soon as possible in 2010."

We're excited to share the news that our friends at the ACLU of Northern California have just launched their dotRights privacy campaign, an impressive effort to spread the word about how online services collect and share reams of personal information about internet users. The entertaining and informative dotRights introductory video summarizes the issue, covering how companies can collect data about you and share that information with data brokers and the government, and how the laws meant to protect the privacy of your internet activities are woefully outdated.

This is the second in a series of posts about the proposed Google Book Search settlement.

The Potential Upside: Enhanced Public Access

From the public's point of view, unprecedented public access to books is the chief benefit promised by the revised proposed settlement (aka Settlement 2.0) of the Google Book Search litigation. That's the "upside" against which all the possible "down-sides" will be measured. And when it comes to enhancing public access, the proposed settlement holds great promise. Whether that promise will actually come to pass, however, is harder to predict.

Here's what we know about Google's book scanning efforts so far [revised in light of updated numbers sent by Google Nov. 19]:

This is the first in a series of posts evaluating the proposed Google Book Search settlement.

When it announced its Book Search project in 2004, Google set for itself an inspiring and noble goal. In the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "Imagine yourself at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written." What started as a dream of universal book search, however, has become something much broader: a class action lawsuit and proposed settlement that hopes to let Americans read, as well as search, millions of books online.

UPDATE: Macworld reports that Apple has changed its mind and approved the "Bobble Rep" app, which is now available in the App Store.

Apple's ridiculous iPhone app approval process has hit a new low, with rejections for “ridiculing public figures" and using Apple's own APIs to access Apple icons. These are just the latestreasons why the U.S. Copyright Office should approve EFF's effort to legalize jailbreaking of the iPhone—customers and developers shouldn't need Apple's approval before using the software they want.

We spend a lot of our time at EFF trying to spot new proposals in copyright across the world, and understanding whether they're good or bad for civil liberties. We're not the only ones: our understanding depends on the work of hundreds of researchers worldwide who are constantly sifting through new drafts and consolidating older reforms in hundreds of nations.